Using HP HAVEn to Give Sales Reps the Power of Data Science

One of the year’s biggest stories in Enterprise Tech is the remaking of HP. The company is in the process of splitting into two huge public companies, with traditional hardware such as printers and laptops on one side of the house, and the other side, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise which will be helmed by Meg Whitman, focusing on cloud computing and tools for business.

I’d like to tell you how that split is already benefitting us here at RingDNA. In the process, I’ll give you a sneak peek on what we’re working on in our labs.

This week in Barcelona, HP announced the launch of HP HAVEn OnDemand, a new set of data in the cloud services (“HAVEn” stands for Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security and the number of Big Data applications that can be built atop the new platform). You can listen to a podcast summarizing the entire announcement here, but below I’ve posted a portion of the transcript of the interview between Interarbor Solutions analyst Dana Gardner, Chief Technology Officer for HP Big Data Fernando Lucini, and RingDNA CEO Howard Brown. This portion specifically focuses on IDOL on Demand, which is a set of APIs under the HAVEn platform.

Gardner: Now, when you’re able to bring all sorts of information and media together, when you’re able to tap web services, social media, when you’re able to create a sentiment engine and a search engine capability, you’re really starting to develop intelligence in new ways.

It seems to me, you can gain insight into markets, prospects, competition, customer inclinations, and directions. It’s really about bringing more of a data-driven aspect to a business in ways that had really been sort of an art before, something that was not always by experience, but was by gut instinct.

Before we go to our use cases, how are we really changing a business environment here? Are we talking about a data-driven approach? Are we giving the type of tools that will move a marketing organization, for example, from guesswork into a scientific approach to how they make decisions?

Lucini: You put it very nicely. We’re moving into a world where we’re allowing instincts to be tested, and tested quickly. In the past, we had a lot of clever professionals in the marketing world making educated guesses about what’s going on, what I like and don’t like, what you like and don’t like, or what’s popular and what’s not. We’re opening the door for businesses to take data, take a sample of it or take it all, it’s their choice, whatever that may be, and in whatever varieties they come, to test out their theories, to see if this theory is correct.

I used to call it the CIO conundrum, where the CIO thinks they’ve got something and it becomes very difficult for them to prove if they do or don’t, and then they question the results when they get them.

We want them to be able to test this out. If they have an opportunity with their voice data and they think there’s massive value in the voice data and they want to cross-correlate it to the social presence, do it, and let the data speak for itself.

It’s now no longer difficult. Just go into the platform, put the voice in there, put the text in there, use the analytics tools, give us our enterprise resource planning (ERP) warehouse. We’ll do the queries and we’ll create what we call combinations — which is everything coming together as one — and test the value.

Now, it no longer matters that this is not a very large project with very large budget. It will prove out the case. We have a next generation of proving things out and being capable of proving things out.

That might lead you to a very interesting onsite project with our tools, where you’re inside a firewall, but you have proven it out. Or it might take you to a very interesting on-demand implementation. Either way you perform the testing or the proving or the thinking in a much more practical way.

It’s very exciting stuff, because there is a real change in the industry, and we all have to adapt to it.

Gardner: It is very exciting. Let’s learn how some people have been using this already to change their business. Let’s go first to RingDNA. Howard Brown, tell us a little bit about your company, what you do, and then how you’ve been using on-demand Haven from HP?

Brown: Thank you. RingDNA is a comprehensive sales acceleration platform that allows companies to create high-performance sales teams by combining powerful communications tools with prospect or customer DNA. That’s a combination of marketing data, social data, customer relationship management (CRM) data, and account history, and pulling that all together to allow a sales rep to perform sales faster.

Gardner: It’s almost as if you’re putting the tools of a data scientist in the hands of a salesperson without them having to be a scientist, to get all sorts of information to make the best call on a call in real-time on an inside sales basis.

Brown: You’ve got it. It’s applying a scientific approach to sales. It’s taking all of the data that exists out there which can be truly overwhelming, prioritizing it, and making it contextual to make sales much more effective.

Garnder: And this cuts across communications, as well as data, applications, and web services. Is that correct?

Brown: Absolutely. We apply both a theory-testing model and set of communication tools. When a RingDNA customer walks in in the morning, they know exactly who they should be calling, who they should be emailing or texting, and prioritizing the messages so that they know exactly who to call, how to reach out to them, and what to say.

What’s so exciting is that you can start to understand buyer intent from marketing data from past interactions with your customers. We can look at voice transcripts and sentiment analysis and have a whole new way of determining who the right prospect is, how we should be contacting them, and with what messages.

Gardner: So it’s up to your organization to take the best of technology, data, and analytics and empower those inside salespeople. It sounds like it’s been up to HP to take the best of its technology in the cloud model and analysis to empower you. How, in fact, has HP empowered RingDNA with your early access use of HP HAVEn on demand?

Brown: It’s been truly game-changing. You nailed it when you talked abut taking business information and human information and combining those two. What HP IDOL OnDemand has provided us is the ability to test all kinds of theories, because every business we work with tends to have a different theory of what a hot prospect may be.

They can simply and easily test those theories using RingDNA and HP IDOL OnDemand. If there are buying signals, like someone visiting a website and downloading a whitepaper in combination with other factors, such as that person viewing web pages or maybe tweeting about their product or service, we can look at that buyer’s sentiment through HP IDOL OnDemand.

We’re taking a bunch of this data, processing it through IDOL, and making our reps that much more productive and that much more powerful.

Gardner: One of the things you’re doing is you are joining and bringing together very disperate data and information and tidbits of analysis. Is HP IDOL OnDemand doing that for you? Are you doing that? How do you make those joins that bring all that information together? Is the cloud the key to doing that?

Brown: The cloud certainly is the key. We couldn’t deliver the type of product and service we do today without the cloud. RingDNA is all about accelerating a sales team’s ability to close deals. The last thing you want is to negatively impact those teams. The cloud model means we can quickly implement a RingDNA process within an organization, bring in all that contextual data, bring in all that metadata, and make that rep that much more productive without negatively impacting their workflow.That’s critical to any business today.

It’s one thing to be able to deliver information. It’s another thing to be able to deliver information and insight without negatively impacting the business. Let’s face it, in this day and age, we can’t afford to slow down. With tools like IDOL OnDemand and RingDNA, you’re not slowing down teams. You’re actually accelerating them beyond what you ever thought was possible.

Gardner: Fernando, as you’re listening to Howard, is there anything about the way that RingDNA is using HAVEn OnDemand that you think highlights some specific benefits or values here. Are they a poster child for a certain type of way in which you can use HAVEn OnDemand?

Lucini: Certainly they understand that they need to use tools to solve their problems and they go ahead and do it. In that respect, it’s great to see. There are a bunch of things we could learn as an industry from them in terms of seeing the opportunity of mixing two pieces of data, how these things collide, and how we get them to customers. I would challenge anybody to check them out because ultimately the end result is key, and I think everybody would be impressed.